The Gringos | Page 4

Shakespeare till you tore it out to start a fire, that
wet night; remember? The arch in his neck, and all? I hadn't gone a
mile on him till I was calling him Surry; and say, Jack, he's a wonder!
Come out and take a look at him. Can't be more than four years old,
and gentle as a kitten. That poor devil knew how to train a horse, even
if he didn't have any sense about whisky. I'll bet money couldn't have
touched him if the man had been sober."
He stopped in the doorway and looked up and down the street with
open disgust. "Come on down to Picardo's, Jack; what the deuce is
there here to hold you? How a man that knows horses and the range,
can stand for this--" he waved a gloved hand at the squalid street--"is
something I can't understand. To me, it's like hell with the lid off.
What's holding you anyway? Another señorita?"
"I'm making more money here lately than I did in the mine." Jack
evaded smoothly. "I won a lot last night. Whee-ee! Say, you played in
some luck yourself, old man, when you bought that outfit. That saddle
and bridle's worth all you paid for the whole thing. White Surry, eh? He
has got a neck--and, Lord, look at those legs!"
"Climb on and try him out once!" invited Dade guilefully. If he could
stir the horseman's blood in Jack's veins, he thought he might get him
away from town.
"Haven't time right now, Dade. I promised to meet a friend--"
Dade shrugged his shoulders and painstakingly smoothed the hair tassel
which dangled from the browband. The Spaniard had owned a fine eye
for effect when he chose jet black trappings for Surry, who was white
to his shining hoofs.

"All right; I'll put him in somewhere till after dinner. Then I'm going to
pull out again. I can't stand this hell-pot of a town--not after the Picardo
hacienda."
"I wonder," grinned Jack slyly, "if there isn't a señorita at Palo Alto?"
He got no answer of any sort. Dade was combing with his fingers the
crinkled mane which fell to the very chest of his new horse, and if he
heard he made no betraying sign.
CHAPTER II
THE VIGILANTES
Bill Wilson came to the door of his saloon and stood with his hands on
his hips, looking out upon the heterogeneous assembly of virile
manhood that formed the bulk of San Francisco's population a year or
two after the first gold cry had been raised. Above his head flapped the
great cloth sign tacked quite across the rough building, heralding to all
who could read the words that this was BILL WILSON'S PLACE. A
flaunting bit of information it was, and quite superfluous; since
practically every man in San Francisco drifted towards it, soon or late,
as the place where the most whisky was drunk and the most gold lost
and won, with the most beautiful women to smile or frown upon the
lucky, in all the town.
The trade wind knew that Bill Wilson's place needed no sign save its
presence there, and was loosening a corner in the hope of carrying it
quite away as a trophy. Bill glanced up, promised the resisting cloth an
extra nail or two, and let his thoughts and his eyes wander again to the
sweeping tide of humanity that flowed up and down the straggling
street of sand and threatened to engulf the store which men spoke of
simply as "Smith's."
A shipload of supplies had lately been carted there, and miners were
feverishly buying bacon, beans, "self-rising" flour, matches,
tea--everything within the limits of their gold dust and their carrying
capacity--which they needed for hurried trips to the hills where was

hidden the gold they dreamed of night and day.
To Bill that tide meant so much business; and he was not the man to
grudge his friend Smith a share of it. When the fog crept in through the
Golden Gate--a gate which might never be closed against it--the tide of
business would set towards his place, just as surely as the ocean tide
would clamor at the rocky wall out there to the west. In the meantime,
he was not loath to spend a quiet hour or two with an empty gaming
hall at his back.
His eyes went incuriously over the familiar crowd to the little forest of
flag-foliaged masts that told where lay the ships in the bay below the
town. Bill could not name the nationality of them all; for the hunting
call had reached to the far corners of the earth, and strange flags came
fluttering across strange seas, with pirate-faced adventurers on the
decks below, chattering in strange tongues of California gold.